“What were you choosing to believe?”
He didn’t blink.
“That this is real,” he said. “That we’re actually going to have a baby. After everything. I keep thinking I’m going to wake up.”
It made sense. I went back to bed.
I would think about that phone call a lot, later.
Ben came to every appointment.
Every single one. He took time off work. He sat in the plastic chair beside the exam table and held my hand and asked the doctor a hundred questions. He kept a notebook. A notebook! He wrote down my blood pressure and my weight and every word the doctor said.
At the first ultrasound, when we heard the heartbeat, that fast little galloping sound like horses running far away, he put his hand over his mouth and turned toward the wall.
“You okay?” I asked.
He nodded without turning around. His shoulders were shaking.
The technician smiled at me. “Dads,” she said. “They always get the worst of it.”
At twenty weeks, we found out it was a girl.
“A girl,” Ben said in the car afterward. He sat in the driver’s seat with the keys in his hand and didn’t start the engine. “We’re having a daughter.”
“Are you disappointed? I know some guys want a boy.”
He turned and looked at me like I’d said something crazy.
“Disappointed? Claire. I don’t care if she’s a girl or a boy or a baby giraffe. She’s ours.” He reached over and put his hand on my stomach. “She’s ours.”
Remember that. He said it. She’s ours.
We painted the gray room yellow. Diane came over every weekend to help. She sewed curtains with little white daisies on them, and she knitted a yellow blanket with a scalloped edge, and she organized the dresser drawers by size, from newborn to twelve months, with her silver bob tucked behind her ears.
